and improve your search results. 

Most database search engines use artificial intelligence that comes from a logic system developed by a 19th-century mathematician, George Boole. Boolean searches use "operators" and "search terms". These operators and search terms may look like regular words but they do NOT function as regular words in the syntax of the sentence.  

In fact they take on a completely new syntactical meaning and, in effect, have a mathematical function rather than a semantically designated reference. In order to use Boolean Logic effectively, it is important to have the ability to define for yourself exactly what it is you are looking for.  

The challenge becomes even greater when educating your pupils to define for themselves what exactly it is they are searching for. The educational ramifications of such a task are far reaching and all the more challenging to teachers of English as a second/foreign language. We need to educate our pupils to think of, and relate to, language in a manner that reaches beyond traditional boundaries, one that students have generally not been exposed to.  Perhaps this facet of language education will broaden our pupils thinking and analytical powers.  

But first, let's try to understand it ourselves:  

How many times have you decided to search for information on a particular topic and come up with literally thousands of results? Then, when you start checking the results, you discover that the web pages don't really relate to what you are looking for.  

For example, the textbook you are using has a unit on The American Civil War and slavery. You decide that this would be a good opportunity to teach your class about Spiritual songs. You do a basic search on "spiritual music" and discover that you have come up with 19872 matches. While looking at some of the matches you find out that spirituals aren't what you thought they were. Let's define these results with the following illustration:  

You want the results that relate to Spiritual Music during The American Civil War. But if you search for information on The American Civil war in the hope of finding something about Spiritual Music, you will again come up with thousands (if not millions) of search results, defined in the following illustration:  

But if you define your search as the following:  
"Spiritual Music" AND "The American Civil War", your search engine will find you sites that relate to "Spiritual Music during The American Civil War".  

The word AND in this search command is called a "Boolean Operator" which has the specific operation of telling the search engine to find all the sites relating to "Spiritual Music" and all the sites relating to "The American Civil War" and then to look in both groups and find the sites that come up in BOTH searches.  

If we relate to our earlier diagrams, then the diagram of this search would look something like this:  

 Now that you have understood the Boolean operator "AND", let's take a look at a few more Boolean operators.  

Let's say you are looking for information about the characteristics of Spiritual Music and you do a search for "characteristics" AND "Spiritual Music" and you come up with very few results. Your search engine works on artificial intelligence and does not have the ability to find synonyms for the word "characteristic" - it will only look for an exact replica. It is up to you to broaden this search by providing a synonym or two in order to get more results. For this function, we use the Boolean operator OR. If you search for "characteristic" OR "attribute" OR "symbol" AND "Spiritual music" , you will come up with more results. 

Let's say you are looking for articles on Spiritual Music, and when you do a simple search you come up with many sites that have the lyrics of Spiritual songs. You can then use the Boolean operator NOT so as not to include the pages with lyrics. If you search for "Spiritual music" NOT "lyric" then your results will not include lyrics. 

Let's try and put this all together - if you are searching for characteristics of Spiritual Music during the American Civil War and do not want to include lyrics, your search string should look something like this: 

"American Civil War" AND "Spiritual music" OR "characteristic" OR "attribute" NOT "lyric".  
 

Not all search engines use Boolean logic. One of the search engines that does use Boolean Operators with good results is the Alta Vista search engine. Below is a table with additional Boolean operators that function in Alta Vista: 
 

 Happy Searching! 

Gail Mann.